Yes, it’s still summertime. But as the 2024 holiday shopping season nears, businesses are increasingly turning to location intelligence to seamlessly integrate physical and digital experiences, creating a cohesive customer journey across both realms. This powerful technology leverages data about places and movement to inform smarter marketing strategies, enhance customer experiences and boost ROI.

Regardless of where people shop or how they buy, they want a seamless customer experience, start to finish. They want to feel that their customer journey, from advertisements and shopping to purchase and delivery, is being delivered by a single entity, no matter how many systems are involved behind the scenes. What they want is an omnichannel experience, even if they don’t know what the term means.

This guide explores the current trends and challenges facing consumer product brands, and lays out tactics and best practices for building direct engagement that is highly personalized and relevant, using omnichannel strategies to reach consumers where they are. Discover how you can better understand your consumers without direct sales, so that you can foster long-lasting relationships and ultimately increase customer lifetime value.

While more marketing professionals are finding success with multichannel marketing, questions surrounding best practices remain. Multichannel marketing remains a key to campaign success. However, as consumers’ attention continues to fracture, knowing which channels to utilize has grown increasingly complicated. Creating an effective strategy remains a core challenge for 53% of marketers executing a multichannel marketing plan, according to a recent report by Ascend2. The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) could either further complicate or simplify the future of multichannel marketing.

The implementation of transformative artificial intelligence-enabled technology investments is shifting the paradigm for how e-commerce businesses operate. Experts  estimate that two-thirds of service providers are already forming cross-functional initiatives to manage generative AI projects. By 2026, 75 percent will be using GenAI to create synthetic customer data, which will be generated by algorithms that mimic real-world samples.

How Gen Z, a generation that grew up alongside technology, is redefining consumer engagement by seeking genuine, in-person connections. The intersection of digital innovation and the resurgence of physical retail spaces shouldn’t come as a surprise. This new era is characterized by a shift in consumer behavior, particularly amongst Gen Z, who are blending their digital fluency with a renewed interest in real-world experiences.

What the Future: Shopping explores the forces that are changing how Americans spend and save, and how that will reverberate across industries. Social shifts, new technologies and changing values are revolutionizing the ways people shop. How will the brands, independent retailers, and superstores that sell to them earn their business?

In What the Future: Shopping, experts on shifting consumer culture, resale and dupe culture, payments, store architecture and everything in between talk shop about how spending and saving will evolve in a revamped retail landscape. With exclusive interviews, polling and insights on shopping frequency and preferred channels, purchase triggers, concerns and challenges, attitudes about “buying American” and consumer worries — plus a close look at AI, ecommerce and influencer marketing — this issue is a one-stop shop.

You’d be hard pressed to find two more overused buzzwords than artificial intelligence (AI)and omnichannel. But when retailers put these two ubiquitous topics together? That’s when the magic starts to happen. There are exciting times ahead as AI finally makes omnichannel retail a reality.

The promise of omnichannel retail

The concept of omnichannel retail experiences is nothing new. Retailers have long sought to provide shoppers with seamless, fully connected interactions regardless of the channel via which they choose to browse or buy.